I have been doing some research on MANETs and UAV’s and this TED talk is a great example of how a number of nodes operate in a MANET and implement some predetermined algorithm, which in this case is the Bond Theme Song. Worth watching. :)
Microsoft recently release the Kinect SDK which allows you to implement a Natural User Interface and program against it! There is a lot of interest around including claims on how Robotics will change to how you can integrate a light sensor. You can use Visual Studio (C++, C# and VB.NET supported) and get quite interesting results. ...
After moving to Bangalore, it turns out that I would need to get one or more UPS’s for the machines at home. The place we will be moving to in a few weeks does have power backup, but if/when there is a power cut it takes a few minutes for the generators to kick in and is not instantaneous as I was thinking. I have never bought a UPS until now and don’t have any experience with it - what are the things that I need to consider? I will have the following equipment running which will need to be powered up for about 15 minutes: ...
Upgrading through *all* versions of Windows from v1 thru to Win7.
I was planning on getting the Telegesis ETRX2USB and wanted to know if there are any open source (or shareware) open source ZigBee stacks that I can use with that? I also wanted to know if there is any opensource (or not too expensive), network management or network analyser for a ZigBee network? Essentially I want to be able to programatically view network and node information on the ZigBee network (e.g. S/N ratio, signal strength, etc.) - something similar to Ember's Insight Desktop which shows the details I am interested in. I could not find anything specific and would be interested in getting ideas. ...
The latest version of WordPress 3.0.3 and the Redirection plugin (v 2.2.3) don’t play nice together. If you upgraded to the latest version of WordPress the redirection plugin will always show only your last post on your blog’s homepage. Until the plugin is fixed, the only way around this is either not to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress (not recommended), or to disable the Redirection plugin.
As you might have heard, the Cray XMT implemented a multithreaded processor architecture (called Threadstorm); these processors are compatible with Socket F which means they can use the AMD Opteron CPUs. The interesting part however is that these Threadstorm CPU’s only execute user code and avoids memory dependency stalls i.e. when the memory dependence prediction goes wrong and stalls the specific load to ensure there is no violation. ...
This is quite cool – now only if MS hurry’s up and incorporated this to Bing Maps. MS Street Slide
This computer hardware chart is quite cool. Not sure why, where and who would want to use this. But, it does beg the question – can things get any geekier? :)
If you were interested in algorithms and interested in some mathematical foundations for algorithm analysis? For example if you are interested in proof techniques, probability, Amortization analysis techniques, Case studies and Asymptotic notions (such as Big-Oh, Big-Omega, Little-oh, little-omega, Big-Theta) then check out these lecture notes (in ppt, 224kb) from California State University.
Well this is the phone I have maybe some day I will try this - pretty geeky albeit useless. :)
(: ¿ɥǝ sıɥʇ sı looɔ ʍoɥ
I finally got the time to upgrade my MCE with the RTM bits of Win7 (was running an old RC build until now). Given this is a dedicated MCE with nothing else on it and an on an isolated part of the network, I don’t have a password set for the Account I use to login (of course not a recommended practice). Now, I wanted to RDP to the machine and I realised then that Win 7 does not allow RDP with blank passwords by default (Vista behaves in the same fashion). The workaround is a simple fix - to update the group policy as Dan shows in this post . Even though that post is for Vista, its the same steps for Win 7. ...
I encountered this interesting issue and thanks to Colin we were able to resolve it. There will be situations you will encounter when adding additional optional attributes to a Flat File (FF) schema in BizTalk will cause problems. To get around this you basically will need to set the following properties to relax the parsing of the attributes which break. 1 2 3 - parser_optimization="complexity" - allow_early_termination="true" - early_terminate_optional_fields="true" This got me thinking more and wanting to understand what does changing these attributes mean under the covers. Below is what I found out on each of these. ...
If you use the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu 9.04 to install OpenSceneGraph, by default it will install version 2.4.x. However if you want to install OpenSceneGraph 2.8.1 then you need to do the following in a terminal: Modify the file /etc/apt/sources.list (make sure you run it via sudo something like: sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list) Add the following two lines in the end and save the file: deb http://openscenegraph.dachary.org/packaging-farm/openscenegraph/gnulinux/debian/unstable/src ./ deb-src http://openscenegraph.dachary.org/packaging-farm/openscenegraph/gnulinux/debian/unstable/src ./ Run in the terminal: sudo apt-get update ...
Wow! Looks like a lot of bots suddenly woke up – major attack in progress. image
I don’t have much experience with image detection in a video, and wanted to understand what options are possible – all I know it is not as simple as “CSI” makes it out to be – yet. Here is the scenario: Say I have a remote controlled aircraft (a mini helicopter) which among other things has a camera fitted which is filming over a certain area. I use a training set and somehow “train” the camera to look for certain objects and recognise data points of that object and learn it to recognize that object (for example a human in Pink). Now once this is trained, if the helicopter is over another area and recording I want it to be able to recognise these pre-trained images in that video feed and do something if something is found (e.g. a human in pink). ...
If you ever tried to write to the event log, without an event source for that application created you will get an exception saying something along the lines of that you do not have permissions to create the event source. If an event source does not exist, it is automatically created. The creation of the event source is a privileged operation and requires elevated privileges (a.k.a admin privileges) which of course might not always be possible if running a web application. ...
If you are ever in a situation where you want to upgrade say from Vista Enterprise edition to Win 7 Ultimate edition - by default you cannot do this. When you insert your Win7 disc you won’t find the upgrade option available and the only way you see forward is to do a complete fresh install (after backing up your data of course). However, that is very time consuming and of course generally a lot of pain. ...
In Haskell the foldl’ function defined in the module Data.List is better than foldl because that does not use a thunk . A thunked expression requires an internal stack. As an expression can grow infinitely large, the runtime imposes a limit on the size of this stack. As the simple example below shows that given a large enough input the stack will overflow. ...
On my machine running all the VM’s at home – one disk has failed. I have not replaced it, instead marked it as OK and am rebuilding the volume now. Second time this has happened – if it happens once more then maybe it is time to actually replace the physical disc. *Sigh* I hate disc failures.
This is probably not new, but I was not aware of it until recently. To launch an application as an administrator you press CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER when using the Search box – instead of just Enter. Pretty cool if you are a keyb guy/gal.
MIT’s Media Lab has a prototype of a wearable 6th sense - pretty damn cool – initially seems to get you thinking “what is the point?”; but sit it out and it will all make sense! Of course the whole “6th sense” is glamorizing it a bit, it is more JIT info. I wonder what happens if your phone is not in a 3G/HSDPA coverage and what the battery drain on the phone is with the data connection always on and how big is your phone bill (most people don’t have unlimited data options on their mobile). ...
I guess since we are all alive , it will be good to understand what that Cern thing really is (pdf). 😄
I was looking for something else and stumbled upon this post from Joe where he lists the qualities that makes up a “good architect” (despite the feelings that have been expressed to me in the past ). I have to agree with him and am quite pleased to see that a “typical” Avanade architect would fit the bill. 😄 ...